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BUILDING A TIME CAPSULE POEM BY POEM – DYLAN DOREN {INTERVIEW/FEATURE}Four years ago, the phrase “Los Angeles’ literary scene” would have been an oxymoron. Since then, the paltry landscape has grown lush with grassroots literary efforts, namely in the form of small publishing presses and zines enthusiastically supported by locals. As short fiction and poetry rise in printed popularity in the city, so too are “prosetry,” storytelling and spoken word performed before audiences in a way most Los Angeleno twenty and thirty somethings haven’t seen in years, or maybe ever. It seems Los Angeles creative writers across the board are finally starting to receive the kind of artistic clout they’ve long deserved.

One of the names steadily making an impact on the ever-growing lit scene is Dylan Doren [pictured], who in 2012, founded the WOMEN group, an all-inclusive poet and writers collective focusing on genuine community in a scattered city and an impersonal digital age. I sat down with Doren at Trystero Coffee in Atwater Village to talk about the Los Angeles collective.

Watch Dylan Doren. Read him, too. His poetry is starting to make its way in the world. There’s a music to it that needs no instrumental accompaniment. You feel the choruses repeat, reflect and resonate as the verses move to minor chords. The words are not notes that line up on lines, but rather more like verticals as they say in marketing, which is jargon for feeding a specialized market, and these stacks of words pull me down through the poem like a revenue stream that actually pays off.

So who is the WOMEN group, and what exactly is the WOMEN group? With the group in its beginning stages the question of who might be harder to describe than the what. The group is a “collective of poets and writers” in Dylan’s words who currently publish chapbooks under the above mentioned name, and they also host poetry readings around Los Angeles. If you want the “what” of it then there you go.

As far as the name the WOMEN group, “I wanted it to be a name that’s provocative and personally meaningful to me. I’m a male, but most of the people I look up to are women, like my mom and the women in history.”
“You notice that femininity is a put-down,” Doren continued. “‘You throw like a girl,’ ‘you’re a p*ssy,’ ‘you’re a b*tch,’”
Though “women” is in the name, the collaboration of writers is coed.
“The words of the poetry stand for themselves; it doesn’t matter if there’s a man or woman behind it,” explained Doren.